Pages

REVIEWS

The Long Rain - Exotic Pylon

http://www.darkentries.be/nl/cds/slow-listener-the-long-rain/
Robin Dickinson is the man behind this project. Since 2007 he collects all kinds of sounds. The only requirement is that they sound interesting enough for him to be saved and preserved. According to the bio imagined 'The Long Rain' a parallel universe, a desolate with dead starry galaxy where few traces of life can be found. Everyone can have their own conception of it. The underlying message is that something horrible beauty can also contain an irresistible attraction to exercise. 'The Long Rain' has two more than twenty-minute compositions: "And Now He Was Mistaken 'and Ondras Rising'. 'And Now He Was Mistaken' is both dominant and repetitive as hypnotic and minimalist. At the same time there is the disturbing thought that, in the most unexpected moment, another disaster may occur. It is this latent threat almost unbearable to wear. "Ondras Rising 'is directed by a relentless stream of failures followed by winds, driving rain, buzzing of insects and a distorted voice lined monologue. "Ondras Rising ', it is a nerve-racking ordeal and like" And Now He Was Mistaken' a bizarre sound sculpture. Difficult to digest, but no less addictive.

http://grisli.canalblog.com/archives/2013/01/25/26223598.html
Bizarreness of the oddities, The Long Rain in Slow Listener requires the auditor to such gloomy electronica version of Castle Argol of Gracq. Oppressive and visionary, finely Gothic without mascara or crows, the work of British musician Robin Dickson permeates long consciences, stretched two episodes of twenty minutes each.
The first song, And He Was Mistaken Nor , gloomy and cavernous voice never ceases to repeat the same morbid obsession a few words, it does not care, otherwise a nice pétoche a deadly chill. A slightly less neurotic Ondras Rising imagine pale echoes cellar BDSM, flitrés a graphite populated Siberian deformed monsters in Nazi uniform. Damn, what a program.

http://www.whisperinandhollerin.com/reviews/review.asp?id=9655
Some bands are obscure because they don’t receive a great deal of exposure, others because their music is extremely niche, and other still because they seem determined to make their music inaccessible. All three scenarios apply to Slow Listener, the musical vehicle of Robin Dickinson. Exotic Pylon Records are issuing ‘The Long Rain’ as a download and cassette only. It’s also extremely odd. And when the press release states, in no uncertain terms ‘it’s really fucking strange’, you know it’s going to be pretty far out – and make no mistake, it is.
Vocal samples, delayed, disembodied, looped and muddy echo around amidst sonorous scraping drones and eerie hums that conglomerate in tonal dissonance that sets your teeth on edge. The two tracks – ‘And Nor Was He Mistaken’ and ‘Ondras Rising’ – that form ‘The Long Rain’ each stretch to around the 23-minute mark, and each precipitate feelings of ill-ease. It’s disquieting, unsettling. Off the wall doesn’t come close. It’s music from another realm. It scrapes the listener’s skull cavity and shakes the brain around a little. It prods and pokes and needles the senses. It’s ambient, but not as we know it… http://de-bug.de/reviews/tag/slow-listener

Gullible listeners seem at the beginning of the first track of Robin Dickson new album a paranormal tape voice be heard the endless evocative words "Owoup! Reviewed Owoup!". Anyway, Brighton's Robin Dicksons spread a strangely surreal atmosphere with its two half-hour tracks. Seemingly harmless crockery rattles, cockroach and Gequietsche, indefinable field recordings, lyre-organ sounds and distorted voices get a quite dark and meaning pregnant atmosphere through skillful arranging and aware schädderige sound quality, feedback and distortion. Nebulous and excitinghttp://www.chaindlk.com/reviews/?id=7343An unaccostumed declension of darkest ambient comes from Robin Dickinson under his moniker Slow Listener on Exotic Pylon, the appreciated and quite eccentric label by Jonny Mugwump, whose unconvenionality for contemporary times is clear since its format: "The Long Rain" has not only been recorded entirely on tape, but the sound is so dirty and crackling that you could surmise the tape he used was overdubbed many times before getting so murky and was found in the forgotten archives of some abandoned loony bin. Sinister squeaks, pitched drones of claustrophobic extended bells, occasional field recordings, a disquieting mechanical meddling with metallic utensils on a sobbing engine and a job lot of other sonic incrustations playing over the somewhat obscure and periodic repetition of the expression "the light" (or was he meant to say "delight"?) by a male of voice before the deep breath of a sleeper on the first suite "And Nor Was He Mistaken" and the more abrasive and scraped drones, the "constipated" corrosions, the recording of a rain shower and unremittingly lo-fi loops and layering before the bizarre monologue on the second part of "Ondras Rising" depict a certain feeling of "enlighted" seclusion and alienation, which partially remind those cut-up stuff by various "esoteric" and majick-oriented industrial transmissions such as Coil's "How To Destroy Angels", Throbbing Gristle's "Hamburger Lady" or more recent dark ritual-ambient Psychick Warriors Ov Gaia's "Dust (At The Crossroads)". The association between the sound of "The Long Rain" and the weird atmospheres of William Hope Hodgson's "The Night Land" - a classic novel which traces the existence of survivors on a dystopian Planet Earth, living inside a huge metal pyramid after the Sun powered off and the only lights on Earth got produced by the glow of some active volcanoes - is quite guessed

http://www.residentadvisor.net/review-view.aspx?id=11980
Since its inception last year, Jonny Mugwump's restlessly eclectic Exotic Pylon imprint has been a source of numerous unexpected delights. The Long Rain, though, is perhaps the imprint's most compelling release yet. It's the work of Robin Dickinson, AKA Slow Listener, and features two cassette side-length pieces of cracked, murky ambient: lo-fi sample collages that sound as though their edges have been worn down through use, faltering under the strain of the half-broken machinery that formed them.
As a recipe, it risks tipping over into blandly "sinister" territory; fortunately Dickinson has a knack for teasing a quiet melancholia out of his source material. The Long Rain both begins and ends with moments of gorgeousness. "And Nor Was He Mistaken" opens with trembling bell-like chords and a voice intoning, with mantric regularity, "the light." "Ondras Rising" closes with curlicues of feedback that weave through one another with a stumbling grace.
Elsewhere, the palette is more spartan but no less delicate. "And Nor Was He Mistaken" advances in a stately fashion, each texture—the furtive clinking of metal, a ragged electrical hum, soft-edged drones—steadily advancing into the foreground before receding to allow the next to take its place. "Ondras Rising," meanwhile, is a little more erratic and abrasive: after a restless opening where strangled tones periodically threaten to burst free of their constraints, the glacial momentum seems to falter, leaving us with a mild sense of purposelessness. Still, Dickinson soon regains his stride, and the latter half is given over to a snatch of bizarre monologue, masterfully looped and layered over itself at different pitches to create a mulchy, dissociative canon of sorts; strange, yes, but addictively so.

Angus FinlaysonPublished / Resident AdvisorThu, 06 December 2012

http://boomkat.com/downloads/581198-slow-listener-the-long-rain
A long-time purveyor of quality tapes and audio curiosities, Robin Dickinson has been cleverly snapped up by the very good Exotic Pylon records and it’s a good thing too. ‘The Long Rain’ might be the most complete vision he’s come up with to date, as he blends a sensitive ear for decomposing drones (think an atonal William Basinski) with a keen understanding of music concrete and noise. The most marvelous thing about ‘The Long Rain’ is the very character of the sounds, and even in the digital realm it plays like a warped Dictaphone tape with bell sounds warbling and fluttering and crunching percussive sounds coming across like Leatherface’s chains draped around your neck before he drags you into the killing room. We’re probably making it sound much darker than it is, but that’s just the thing – Dickinson has left so much to the listener themselves; the music is at times just low end warbles, radio interference and other-worldly tones, so it depends on our references for those sounds how we actually hear them, and that’s a very good thing indeed. A stunning piece of music, one for fans of Geoff Mullen, PAN or Kevin Drumm – seriously, don’t sleep!